


days like this

by OceanMyth



Series: Ocean's ATLA Drabbles, Oneshots, and Ficlets [20]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Healing, but katara is healing, it's slow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:21:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27869106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanMyth/pseuds/OceanMyth
Summary: Aang dies earlier than in canon, and Bumi dies with him. Katara is learning to live with her grief.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Bumi II & Katara (implied)
Series: Ocean's ATLA Drabbles, Oneshots, and Ficlets [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2113209
Comments: 13
Kudos: 27





	days like this

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oreocheesecakes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oreocheesecakes/gifts).



There are days that are warm, and days that are cold. Days that are sunny, and days that are rainy, and for the most part, Katara loves them all. Loving things is hard now, but it’s good practice. She’ll progress beyond  _ things  _ soon, she thinks, but she’s not rushing it. She’s got time.

All the time in the world.

Not that she has much of a world left.

Katara loves most days, and most weather, but there’s one kind of day that she just can’t appreciate, no matter how hard she tries. It’s neither rain nor sun, cold or warm. It sits, like an ill omen, like the thing in her chest, and she can’t grow to love it, no matter how hard she tries.

Every time she’s made this journey, the last day of the trip has been one of those days. No matter how she plans, no matter how she scrutinizes the weather patterns from her window, no matter how closely she pays attention to the words of the sailors and fishermen at the docks. It’s always grey and bleak, no matter how hard she tries.

She might have a better time learning to love those grey in-between days, if she didn’t associate them so closely with this pilgrimage.

Katara reaches the shore by canoe. There’s not a better way to travel really, not now, and being alone with her thoughts is… nice. 

Her house— well, Sokka and Suki’s house really— has only gotten more noisy, since the addition of their youngest boy. She should think about moving soon, but she’s not sure it’s a good idea for her to be spending too much time alone.

She gets lost, after spending too much time alone, with nobody to bring her home. 

Katara spends a lot of time thinking about home these days. 

What’s in a home? Is it a place, or the people you love? If your home is the people you love, what happens when one of them is gone? What happens when they’re gone, and they take the future you thought you’d have together with them?

She lifts the canoe out of the water with ease, and flips it over. There’s no promise of rain on her skin, or swirling in the air around her—but that’s no reason to let a perfectly good canoe get filled with rainwater.

There’s no wind today either, but there’s somehow never wind on the days she comes to visit. It’s strange, but she doesn’t mind. If anything, it makes things a little easier on her. She has some very special memories associated with the wind, and though they are bittersweet, they are never sad. She’d hate to taint them with grief.

The trek to the top of the mountain is slow and painful. He hadn’t been kidding, the first time they’d come here, and he’d said that the only way to get to the top was by flying bison. The effort keeps her from thinking though.

Katara doesn’t know when she’d started thinking too much. She’d always thought that was a problem  _ Sokka  _ would have, not her. Funny how life can surprise you like that.

When she gets to the top, she stumbles to the edge of the cliff, dumping her bedroll along the way, and then drops to her knees. Both because her legs are weak from the climb, and because suddenly all the emotions she hasn’t been thinking about for the past few hours hit her.

The sun is sinking over the rim of the oceans, and everything is glowing orange and blue through the grey. Katara swings her legs over the edge of the cliff, and lets herself pretend, for just a minute, that everything is still okay.

“I’m back,” she says. There’s not much fanfare to it, but then she’s not really proud of this annual pilgrimage of hers. He wouldn’t want her to be wrapped in her grief still. 

She’s too afraid to let it go.

“I’m quite mad at you, if you didn’t know. You probably do. But— I just—I can’t keep ignoring the room down the hall— did you know that we haven’t opened it up since—” she chokes when she realizes what she was about to say. “I can’t keep ignoring the empty place in bed. I can’t keep kissing strangers and pretending that they’re you.”

“I can’t wake up in the morning, and pretend that you aren’t missing from every part of my life,” Katara says, and she feels a tear fall onto her hand. She’s crying now. 

She’s a little surprised the tears hadn’t started sooner.

  
  
“I can’t _do this_. You left, and you took our son with you. And all that I got to keep was this hole,” she says, thumping her heart with a closed fist. She snorts, bitterly amused with herself.

“I suppose that’s fitting though.”

She’s run out of things to say now, and she regards the empty sky beyond the edge of the cliff for a long moment. There’s no response, not that she expected one. The only person who could respond, with the sky and the wind, is dead.

(And it’s her fault.)

“Happy birthday, Aang.” Katara says, finally, and the first stir of wind brushes across her cheeks. The teartracks prickle, and she can feel them drying under the gentle breeze.

Katara loves most days, and that’s something she’s proud of. Every little thing counts, if she can find the littlest trace of beauty in it. If she can love it.

But there’s no way around the fact that some days are just miserable.

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> I don't know why I gravitate toward dead!Aang fics either.
> 
> I'm still accepting [prompts](https://justoceanmyth.tumblr.com/post/636443324610379776/50-dialogue-prompts), if you want to take the opportunity to make me write actual fluff for once.


End file.
